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Phoenix DRM Reads Your E-Mail
martensitic writes "eWeek reports that Phoenix has developed a utility allowing users of its laptop DRM BIOS (last discussed here) to 'check their Outlook data on a notebook computer without needing to boot the machine.' Since Longhorn is still several years away, Pheonix is developing their own trusted apps to sell the BIOS to laptop manufacturers. One can only imagine what other innocuous bells and whistles will be used to leverage DRM onto Joe Laptop's machine."
last I checked, Award == Phoenix....
Well, there is linuxbios but what I would really like to see is open firmware for intel architecture (not sure if that is possible)
http://www.OpenBIOS.info
Try already exists.
Look at:
LinuxBIOS: http://www.linuxbios.org/index.html
OpenBIOS: http://www.openbios.info/
FreeBIOS: http://freebios.sourceforge.net/
GBIOS: http://www.agelectronics.co.uk/gbios/
Some (like LinuxBIOS) have boot times under a second from cold start to mounting / (root).
Each comes with their own strenghts (and weaknesses). The trick will be to get everyone to adopt a better BIOS than the one pre-installed on their computer. Messing around with BIOS isn't as easy as messing around with a new web browser, so don't expect mass adoption any time soon.
It's not like the BIOS transmits info anywhere else or logs keystrokes.
and how do you know that? Has everyone forgotten the last fiasco with this company? for a quick reminder see http://www.cexx.org/phoenix.htm.
Their PhoenixNET BIOS (circa 2001) would change your home page and search engine, pop up links on your desktop and in your web-browser and would automatically download and install software on your machine!
And you're going to trust these people with your PIM data?
I'm pretty sure that MS has. PartitionMagic and Ghost, for example, can both read and write NTFS partitions.
The specs for NTFS have not been released publicly, which is why the Linux implementation of NTFS is so incomplete.
RTFA, it will require a plugin in Outlook which basically will export your email to a flat ascii file which can be read by the BIOS. Not exactly the invention of the century, but I guess reasonably practical. If they make the fileformat open, you can program a linux version!!
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
OpenFirmware for Intel is perfectly feasable - indeed, the portability of OpenFirmware was a design intent. No one makes such a board.
On the other hand, it wasn't an Intel creation, and thus is suffereing from NIH (Not Invented Here). Intel are looking at recasting the whole boot up process, but they're using thier own replacement, and not OpenFirmware. They call it EFI, see, for example, http://deviceforge.com/articles/AT8747644820.html
The claim is that Intel's solution is superior - and no doubt it is, in some technical aspects. However, comments like the parent show that a uniformity in boot up process would be worth a lot.
My wife's Inspiron suspends and/or hibernates with 100% reliability. Granted, it's on XP now, but it was fine under 98 as well. In fact, that laptop probably hasn't been rebooted in about a month or two, and that reboot was for updates as well.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
But in suspend, they got such dismal battery "life." I mean, 1.5 hours of battery life for regular use, 8 hours of suspend? I have had my Mac suspended for weeks with no problem. What is so hard about bringing the power use down when the machine is all but off?
There are two kinds of suspend: suspend to RAM (S2R) (which still requires power for the RAM and may or may not be able to turn of mostly everythign else, depending on hardware and BIOS capabilities) and suspend to disk (S2D), which, of course, can consume essentially nothing.
This is the difference between "suspend" and "hibernate" in Windows parlance. Most modern hardware fully supports ACPI, since it's a requirement for being MS-certified. Windows, esp XP has excellent ACPI support, but its configuration can be botched up by someone that doesn't know what they're doing - either a user or the factory. The design of Windows' power managment interface makes it far too easy to do the wrong thing. If properly configured, though, the machine will first enter S2R, then, after a certain time (or when the batteries begin to cave in), it will transition to S2D and cut power to an absolute minimum. Sadly, many Windows laptops let the batteries get eaten in S2R mode *before* saving to disk. This is just bone-headed policy, though, not an architectural problem. Users can fix it if they understand what they're doing. (Although, to be fair, the location and size of the S2D file or partition can be a problem, especially if you've increased the amount of RAM and the S2D partition wasn't enlarged to match. (It seems to me *this* is the sort of thing laptops BIOSes shoud be taking care of automatically - when more RAM is detected, check to see if there's enough free space, and if there is, juggle things around to enlarge the S2D partition (sometimes a file under Phoenix-derived BIOSes, making this easier)and shrink the user partitions accordingly. Tricky, but not really all that hard.)
Linux is still problematic, since it's ACPI support is much-improved lately, but still not really up to the task. So far as I'm concerned, this is still a major area where Linux is just not really capable of playing in the modern world yet - pretty much everything today should have and use ACPI, not just laptops.
I agree that only Apple makes this whole process work anything at all like it should...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Windows XP is much, much faster with the hibernation stuff. In my experience, at least three times as fast.
My datum: Dell 5150, 256MegRAM. Either no peripherals or just a USB mouse (Targus). It goes into hibernation pretty quickly but coming out takes quite a while. I get to the login screen fast, but after selecting a user (even one currently logged in) it takes a couple minutes to get the desktop loaded.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
OpenBIOS
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;